The project was a twinning project within the EU Commission’s enlargement programme (Phare Twinning Project HU99/IB/SO01). In the project Sweden served as the leading Member State in a consortium with the United Kingdom. The period of the project was September 2000–September 2001.
Benchmarks on chemical safety institutions have been compiled on the situations in Germany, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. It has been based mainly on personal communication with key persons at the core units or core agencies in the actual field. The red line of the study has been to find out about these cores and their tasks.
In some crucial parts of the report there are benchmarks on each of the five Member States. In other parts the benchmarking has concentrated on some of them, depending on findings of interest – that may be to make clear some main tendencies or to sort out different routes of institution building. The cases of the UK and Sweden have in some regards been more deeply looked upon. One reason for that is simply that there was more information easily available since these were the Member States actively engaged in the twinning.
The findings are presented to serve as a mirror to the candidate country considering its institution building efforts.
The concept chemical safety is understood in the contemporary sense. It is a concept that has developed together with the perspectives of public health and environmental protection. Nowadays it presupposes a preventive stance and a precautionary point of departure, focusing on risk management from the very beginning of chemicals handling, the placing of the products on the market.
Chemicals control is understood in this report as the area of chemical safety that refers to the handling of chemical substances or preparations – classification, product information, industrial use of chemical products, private consumption and so forth. The expression placing chemicals on the market refers to the first step of chemicals handling – importers, manufacturers or trade intermediaries making chemical products available.
The expression core body of chemicals control refers to the specific Member State authority appointed to undertake the actual responsibilities.
The concept existing (old) substances refers to the substances found to be in industrial use in the European Union in a survey of 1981. New substances refer to the introduction of substances that were not represented in that survey.
The concept biocides refers to substances used in chemical preparations or other contexts to prevent damages by microorganisms. Plant protection products, however, are excluded by the EU terminology, because their regulation is defined separately.
The number of each chapter and the title given by that number are referring to the objectives to benchmark indicated by the covenant between the twinning partners. The second title given to each of the chapters refers to main findings or to the grasp I took on the topic.
There is a summary of the findings. Giving advice to the Hungarian health authorities, I have referred to some of these findings.
Conclusions, however, are not drawn by this report. That is because there is not yet the whole picture. Given the purpose of this study, the drawing of conclusions should take into consideration not just the pattern of Member State institutions, but also the possibilities of the Candidate Country at the present stage of institution building.
Stockholm 23 October 2001